The explosion of over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms in India—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, SonyLIV, and regional platforms such as Manorama MAX and Sun NXT—has fundamentally transformed the conditions under which Indian audiences encounter gendered representations on screen. Unlike theatrical cinema, which is consumed in public, communal, and temporally bounded settings, OTT content is consumed privately, individually, and on demand—often on personal smartphones in domestic spaces. This paper argues that this shift in the apparatus of spectatorship produces a distinctive mode of female spectatorship that requires new analytical frameworks beyond Mulvey’s (1975) foundational theorisation of the cinematic male gaze. Drawing on feminist reception theory (Ang, 1985; Radway, 1984), Mankekar’s (1999) ethnographic analysis of Indian television and gendered subjectivity, and the author’s doctoral research on body politics and female spectatorship in Indian visual culture, the paper examines how Indian women negotiate gender representations in three critically acclaimed OTT series: The Great Indian Kitchen (2021, Malayalam), Made in Heaven (2019–2023, Hindi), and Bombay Begums (2021, Hindi). Through critical textual analysis informed by feminist spectatorship theory, the paper identifies three modes of gendered reception that the OTT apparatus enables: intimate identification (the private screen as a space of recognition), critical distance (the capacity to pause, rewatch, and analyse), and affective community-building (the social media discourse that extends the spectatorial encounter into networked feminist publics). The paper contributes to the intersection of feminist media studies, platform studies, and Indian cultural studies.

The motif of the Rückenfigur—a figure shown from behind, facing into the pictorial space—has become almost synonymous with Caspar David Friedrich and German Romantic landscape painting. Yet as a compositional device and as a visual problem, the Rückenfigur has a deeper, more complex genealogy within Western art. From early experiments in Giotto’s frescoes to the domestic interiors of Vermeer and the erotic nudes of Velázquez and Ingres, painters repeatedly turned figures away from the viewer to organise space, withhold narrative information, and complicate the act of looking. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich’s landscapes codified the Rückenfigur as a privileged site for negotiating the sublime, the relation between subject and nature, and the temporality of viewing. Subsequent artists—Gustave Caillebotte, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper and others—reworked this motif in urban, domestic, and psychologically charged contexts, shifting its meaning from Romantic immersion in nature toward alienation, introspection, and modern subjectivity. This article traces the Rückenfigur as a Western art-historical phenomenon, moving from early antecedents to Romantic codification and modern transformations. Alongside close readings of selected paintings, it draws on theories of spectatorship and embodiment to argue that the Rückenfigur functions as a privileged device for staging the spectator’s position and for exploring the tension between identification and distance. Finally, the essay briefly considers the survival of this motif in photography, film, and contemporary art, suggesting that the figure seen from behind remains a powerful means of thinking about seeing, subjectivity, and the limits of representation.

Comic persona is a central term in both comedy scholarship and comedic practice, which is used to analyse the performance of self in stand-up comedy and the relationship between a comedian’s onstage and offstage self. In recent years, however, some comedians have played with and troubled the idea of a consistent comic persona. This article takes two such comedy shows, Bo Burnham’s Make Happy (2016) and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (2018), as case studies to argue that the notion of comic persona restricts discussions about stand-up comedy to metaphysical notions of self-expression, authenticity, and truth, and hampers our understanding of the comedy audience. Drawing on theories of spectatorship from the field of theatre and performance studies, the article proposes theatricality and absorption as helpful concepts to analyse the strategies employed by stand-up comedians to play with the perspectives of their audiences. While absorption refers to a strategy of playing into, and implicitly confirming, the cultural perspectives of an audience, theatricality denotes the critical strategy of deconstructing and making explicit these perspectives, and points to the spectatorial awareness that reality itself is socially scripted and staged in ways that resemble the theatre. While Burnham’s deconstruction of comic persona works to confuse audiences about the distinction between real and staged, and to present a critique of the late capitalist pressure to perform, Gadsby’s emancipatory politics holds on to the idea of stand-up as a mode of truth-telling so as to make room for their story about homophobia and sexual assault.

The aim of this this paper is to analyse the film Intimidades de una cualquiera (1974) by Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli in relation to the social, economic, and cultural modernisation of the 1960s and 1970s. We consider the prison to be the key space-concept of the film in which the complex reformulation of sexual, religious, and economic subjectivities is concentrated. Within the broader theoretical framework of modernity, we establish a dialogue between the history of gender and sexuality, reception studies, critical theories of spectatorship and the recent critical revaluation of exploitation cinemas. From this perspective, we argue that the production, narrative, and reception of the film are grounded in subjective and institutional contradictions that transcend any simple dichotomy between tradition and modernity.

Abstract Although the narrative of Squid Game critiques socioeconomic structures, the characters, genre, filming techniques, and aesthetics, ironically, situate audiences as passive spectators. In this article, we discuss the ways Squid Game constructs a polyvalent Korean spectatorship and a critical Western spectatorship within the survival game genre. We argue the series hails spectators to consent to the same oppressive socioeconomic structures the show seemingly critiques. Additionally, we consider potentials of rhetorical witnessing for activating audiences and extending spectatorship theory.

Police Inspector Laura Lebrel, divorced mother of twins, with a disorganised personal and professional life is an unlikely heroine for a police procedural. Yet not only does she solve every murder mystery with uncanny ease, she is one of Television Española’s (Spanish State Television) poster girls of success. As an extreme example of genre hybridization (police procedural, murder mystery, sitcom, workplace and family drama), there is something for everybody in the identification process and entertainment value, thus maximising the target audience, bringing the whole family to reunite in front of the TV set. This article explores if and how female identities are still embedded in a phallocentric imaginary and to what extent this series breaks the conventions of crime drama. To this end I discuss Cawelti’s now classic notions on the social function of formula culture such as murder mysteries and combine them in a fruitful discussion with Plantinga’s concepts of character engagement and concern-based construals. Plantinga’s analysis of the emotional viewing experience allows us to take seriously a popular TV show that might otherwise be decried for its cheap emotionalism. This article fills a significant critical gap in the field of Spanish visual culture. Positioned at the intersection between Hispanic Studies, gender studies and TV studies, it gives space to a productive cross-fertilisation of theories of spectatorship, comedy, and formula culture. It thus fulfils a dual purpose of contributing to both Hispanic Studies and the international body of gender and TV Studies. Central to my discussion will be the issue of women in the workplace and the perennial question of how professional women negotiate the public/private divide.

As I watch the infamous scene in Tom Six's 2009 release, when Katsuro, the front segment of the centipede, defecates into the mouth of the second, my body rocks back and forth in a futile attempt at self-soothing. I hear the distant whine of a voice uttering, 'I don't want, I don't want to', before I realise it is my own. Finally, in a mixture of horror and relish, my back arches, my shoulders hunch forward and my chest heaves as I retch once, twice, three times.
 The Human Centipede belongs to a large and varied group of films released in recent years that have become notorious for eliciting intensely physical responses, from anxiety and nausea, to the fear of, desire to or even act of vomiting. In this paper, I build on current research into the embodied spectator by creating a detailed analysis of how physicality is constructed and manipulated by representations of faeces in this scene.
 Engaging with Richard Rushton's theories of spectatorship, Vivian Sobchack's studies of phenomenology and film, and Elizabeth Wilson's work on neuroscience, I explore the concept of physical spectatorship - the idea that embodied responses to film are textual constructions that return the viewer to a sense of their own corporeality. The notion of physical spectatorship challenges the dichotomy of film as object/viewer as subject, as well as the language we use to theorise the film-viewer relationship. By acknowledging the disgust this film generates, I question the extent to which notions of the viewer are strained against the concept of spectator as textual construction. Finally, I aim to theorise that which often escapes analysis in relation to film spectatorship: those body parts that make up the gastrointestinal tract, or the gut, that are brought into play in films designed to revolt.

Reviewed by: House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience by Lakshmi Srinivas Jasmine Nadua Trice (bio) House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience by Lakshmi Srinivas. University of Chicago Press. 2016. $112.50 hardcover; $37.50 paper; also available in e-book. 312 pages. The title of Lakshmi Srinivas's provocative 2016 book, House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience, positions the work as a revision of one of cinema and media studies' most critiqued analytical categories. The "active audience" is most commonly associated with audience studies research that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s amid heated debates about the nature of structure and agency, the political stakes of research, and the perceived overreach of postmodernism in media studies. Such debates reflected a bifurcated field, divided into cultural studies and political economy approaches. The former located the power of meaning at the point of reception—audiences were no longer "passive" receptacles of media texts but "active" interpreters and producers of textual meaning. Emerging as a corrective to the textually driven theories of spectatorship that had ruled the field during the heyday of screen theory, models of the active audience deprioritized state policy and industrial structure, deploying a variety of empirical research methods to investigate the ways that audiences might read "against the grain" of mainstream media texts.1 In response, critics deemed this approach indulgent, irrelevant, and even dangerous in its populism, inordinately focused on the vagaries of individual interpretation. Over time, such critiques would seem to have won out, making House Full's revision of the much-maligned label "active audience" an interesting choice. More recent trends in the field have not so much [End Page 184] rejected the audience as turned toward the audience's interaction with industry, working at the interstices of structural and agential approaches to media studies.2 Much recent research in Indian, primarily Hindi-language, cinema has taken an industrial approach as well, parsing the industry's transformation from a putatively national enterprise to a transnational, multimedia business.3 By comparison, House Full is highly localized, focusing on industrial protocols only as a means of understanding their implications for social practices. It uses the term "active" to "describe the voluble cinema hall audience and an in-theater experience marked by spontaneity, improvisation and performance that is far removed from the silent absorption of film associated with mainstream audiences in Anglo-American and Western European (multiplex) settings."4 Srinivas describes these practices as "an active aesthetic," a "mainstream aesthetic of engaging with cinema," positioning this attention to audience as a means of embodying the abstract spectator of gaze theory.5 In this way, the research adds considerably to the growing scholarship on film exhibition in India, where single-screen cinemas have decreased dramatically due to growing middle-class affluence and the parallel emergence of multiplex cinemas.6 Unlike these other works, however, House Full is not as concerned with institutions of production or industry, although filmmakers, theater managers, and distributors are key informants in its analysis. Rather, drawing from the work of anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, Srinivas describes her objects of study as located in the social. As she writes, "the 'field,' then, includes Indian cinema's 'public culture,' defined … as a 'zone' or 'arena' of 'cultural debate,' a 'partially organized space' where various cultural forms encounter one another."7 Her interest is not just in cinema per se but also in the social meanings, forms of collectivity, and negotiations of class and gender identity that emerge in the sites where film culture interacts with public culture. Srinivas's research is organized around a specific field site, the city of Bangalore, the capital of the South Indian state of Karnataka. Consequently, the work is at once highly localized in its setting and extremely porous in its approach to what constitutes the cinema. The space of the theater is contiguous with the space of the city, and this local context—based on spaces and social networks that exist outside the theater itself—becomes the grounds for shaping the cinema experience. Locating her study in [End Page 185] this cosmopolitan, urban setting, Srinivas describes her "active reception aesthetic" as a subdued variation...

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the representation of a female lawyer whose personal tragedy encourages her to become a heroine lawyer for the socially disadvantaged. It explores a female filmmaker’s account of a woman lawyer fighting for a lost cause and examines in what way the public/private, law/justice and reason/emotion dichotomies are played out in her public performance and private life. Central to my discussion will be the significance of emotion in filmmaking, law and social justice. I use Carl Plantinga’s seminal work on the emotional experience of the spectator and his cognitive-perceptual account of the viewing process, and combine it with a fruitful discussion of the genre of female lawyer films, as theorized by Cynthia Lucia and Orit Kamir in two pioneering studies on female lawyer films. This article fills a significant critical gap in the field of Spanish law and film. Positioned at the intersection between law, film and emotion, it gives space to a productive cross-fertilization of theories of spectatorship and the female lawyer film.

The commercial mainstream Hindi cinema known as Bollywood is seeing exemplar shift in the ideologies that rein the business of creating narratives in the 21st century. The Multiplex, the achieving of a legal industry entity for Mumbai films which earlier belonged to primarily unorganized sector, vertically integrated conglomerate structures and Hollywood collaborations have influenced changes in stylistic elements of storytelling. Bollywood's strongest element is emergence of the new gender narrative, metamorphosed heroine, incipient as a protagonist on reel. This change is a symbolic, reflective of urban socio-political-economic India, which has witnessed a systemized entry of women professionals in mainstream workspaces involving leadership, technical skill, and a gradual increase of a strong women workforce in many specialized domains including the commercial film making landscape. This paper examines the characteristics of visible change in character construction of female protagonists and their interrelationship with an evolving spectatorship within the domain of discourse analysis and spectatorship theory. The term, ‘quasi-empowered’ deciphers the cosmetic from the empowered reflection of Bollywood's new women who represent desire, aspiration, and corporeal and cerebral ambition. It also looks at intersection of politics of representation, feminist film theory while integrating reel and real dynamics within case studies. The paper aims at deconstructing select Bollywood narratives to assess ‘lack’ with respect to presence and absence of agency within popular contemporary film text.

The End of Extreme Cinema Studies Troy Michael Bordun Kerner, Aaron Michael, and Jonathan L. Knapp. Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. Pp. vii+179. Frey, Mattias. Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers UP, 2016. Pp. viii+298. Despite critic James Quandt's insistence that "extreme cinema" had been effectively ended by Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009) (Quandt 212), both filmmakers and scholars continue to work in and on this 21st-century art cinema production trend. 2016 marked the appearance of two scholarly volumes on extreme cinema. Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp's Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media investigates the affective potential of the trend, that is, by assessing a number of films' graphic and explicit representations and the implications these representations have for spectatorship theory. Conversely, Mattias Frey's Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture unravels the production trend in terms of its "industrial systems, regulatory systems, [and] reception" (9). Frey's research includes but is not limited to extreme films' exhibition at festivals, their home-market distribution, and importantly, a homogeneous discourse from directors, critics, and academics. Although there is no denying that extreme films share affinities with horror, pornography, and exploitation fare, Frey observes that each of the players in extreme cinema discourse mark the trend "high art" rather than one of the so-called low genres. On the one hand, Kerner and Knapp rehearse theoretical arguments found in much extreme cinema scholarship over the last decade or so and, on occasion, acknowledge the tension between high and low genres. Frey, alternatively, shifts the focus of recent scholarship: his empirical study of the industrial workings of the trend is a direct [End Page 122] response to the speculations of authors such as Kerner and Knapp. I Each volume begins by defining extreme cinema. Kerner and Knapp concede to the definition of extreme cinema as a body of international films with little narrative momentum that nevertheless make use of "abrupt [narrative] ruptures" which include heightened displays of "brutal violence" and "graphic sexual imagery" (1). Strangely, for a trend that is apparently not too concerned with narrative, these two authors will summarize and assess film narratives at great length. Kerner and Knapp also expand the heretofore applied definition of the trend as a body of international art cinema films to include "extreme" representations in comedy films, animated comedy programs, reaction videos, and online pornography of (perhaps) the most disgusting sort. With this addition to the repertoire of extreme cinema, the volume is neither explicitly about art cinema nor auteurism, an institution and a theory often studied by extreme cinema scholars. A few chapters in Extreme Cinema focus on films and directors associated with the production trend as defined by Quandt and the authors in Tina Kendall and Tanya Horeck's edited volume The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (2011), also published by Edinburgh UP. However, for their study, Kerner and Knapp provide no justification for their use of "extreme cinema" and repeatedly confuse a number of trends and subgenres such as "torture porn" and international art house fare.1 It is worth quoting Horeck and Kendall here, for already in 2012 extreme cinema scholars were beginning to think beyond the observed negative affects a single film may have on an ideal spectator. In their introduction to the Cinephile special issue on "Contemporary Extremism," Horeck and Kendall present the following warning: A key task for scholarly work on extreme cinema is to think through fine-grained distinctions between the range of spectatorial dynamics that underpin [the recent] shift from art house extremism to multiplex or horror film festival circuit extremisms. While these [latter] films might share a desire to push the boundaries of the watchable, they are addressed to different audience demographics, and operate according to their own distinctive narrative and genre paradigms, to produce dissimilar affective responses. Again, while recognizing affinities between films that seek to test the spectator's mettle through relentless exposure to graphic horror, it is vital to recognize...

Installation and the Moving Image Catherine Elwes, Wallflower Press, 2015Since at least the Sixties, there has been a large divide between artists who made film and video for the gallery and those who made it for the cinema. This divide could be broadly characterised as indifference/ ignorance of the gallery artists towards the cinema artists and suspicion/jealousy flowing the opposite way, with side skirmishes between the materialists of film and the pluralists of video. A large frustration on the cinema side has been a sense of the ignorance or even duplication of history and a disregard for the dialogue that has developed over the course of that history on the part of the art market.Catherine Elwes' new book is a helpful corrective for some of these divisions. As a survey of the artist moving image, the most remarkable thing is that she writes a wide path into the history of the installation. Early on in the book, she claims that she is not describing a trajectory that brings everything together, arriving triumphant at the high renaissance of today's digital gallery installations. Rather, anyone approaching this book as a primer on installation art will instead receive a high degree of insight beyond the gallery canon. Elwes first discusses the impact of architecture, painting, sculpture and performance on how artists deal with space, object and time-, which are logical but often underplayed antecedents to installation. This sets the stage for a remarkably extended tour of film history, complete with a thorough discussion of structural film and its connection with expanded cinema-both of which, through their polemics or ephemerality, were originally positioned quite opposite to the gallery project (ironically, expanded cinema- like performance-is often the history that the current art market seems most interested in reclaiming). Most of Elwes' focus is on disciplinary practices, but she devotes a strong chapter to the longstanding debate on spectatorship. She describes various theories of spectatorship, investigates the central gallery/cinema argument about whether the ambulant or sitting spectator has more power, and briefly suggests that cognitive theory may provide new answers to these ongoing questions.As mentioned, a large majority of the book does not describe much in the way of blue chip installation art (although Bill Viola and Douglas Gordon do get some play), instead focusing on an array of film and video sub-disciplines that exists outside the gallery context. Even contemporary gallery transplants like Anthony McCall are linked to the role his early work had to the cinematic context. …

Films are, indisputably, objects. Archives are devoted to the painstaking and costly work of preserving and storing films, and countless reels have been lost to the ravages of chemical decay and physical neglect. Films are materially reproducible, duplicated into an everincreasing array of analogue and digital formats. And yet debates about the ontological status of tend toward generalities about the medium as a whole, often limiting their scope to the screened image rather than the physical mechanisms by which those images are stored and conveyed. And formal readings of individual titles rarely consider the nuanced distinctions between their competing, physical manifestations. One could easily imagine writing about the text Rear Window (1954) as a singular filmic object of study, for example, but it would be quite unusual to make reference to the streaming platform, file format, and model of video monitor used to conduct that study, to devote attention, in other words, to the specific material qualities of that particular Rear Window object.In short, film's object status, in both colloquial discussions and in the field of theory, is highly unstable and rife with contradictions. There are reels of rusted into cans in deep storage that have never been and will likely never be projected. There are whose celluloid incarnations have been destroyed that continue to circulate via video and digital duplicates. Other no longer exist in any format but can be studied through their intertextual traces via scripts, production notes, stills, storyboards, press kits, reviews, advertisements, and accounts of spectators. Nearly all contemporary exist only as digital files, edited, enhanced, rendered, and distributed as code but still prone to deterioration, file corruption, and format obsolescence. Production processes are equally marked by their material histories, manifest in the peculiarities of stock, gauge, grain, pixel, and compression algorithm. The material status of each of these examples is distinct, yet in every case the works would be referred to as films by most audiences and scholars (although in the case of digital works, film might remain in scare quotes). If is an object, then, it constitutes an object category with an enormous range of physical and virtual characteristics. This range expands exponentially when we further consider the vast theoretical complications attending the screenedimage-as-object, or the diversity of approaches we might take to objects and forms as they are captured and mediated cinematically.Volker Pantenburg points to three primary registers via which we might distinguish cinematographic objects: (1) objects in film; (2) objects of film; and (3) as an object.1 Yet while these registers are clearly mutually inflected, established discourses of and media theory make it vexingly difficult to shift between them in a single study. Some scholarship, particularly in the field of video studies, has been exemplary in overcoming this challenge.2 Yet as a whole, studies of filmic ontology have centered disproportionately on the status of the moving image as an ephemeral screened object, a privileged state or process through which objectimages attain new material presence. While the case study that follows focuses much of its attention on as physical objects, a larger set of unanswered questions motivates my query: Can theory attend to the aesthetics and ontology of the image object while paying equal attention to the fragility of its individual manifestations and to the conditions of its production and reception? Can theories of spectatorship be reconciled with archival work on diverse reception practices? Can we historicize more explicitly the interventions and politics of various modes of and media theory?My thinking about the object status of has been recently complicated by several archival encounters with a series of 16mm pornographic peep show loops produced in Seattle in the late 1960s: the Starlight films. …

Modifying a contrast introduced by Dixon, Stephen Mumford distinguishes between ‘partisan’ and ‘purist’ ways of watching sport. Recognising that the extreme partisan and extreme purist positions do not explain the nature of sports spectatorship, Mumford follows Dixon in adopting the idea of moderate partisanship (any spectator who is neither all-partisan nor all-purist). He outlines three theories of spectatorship designed to address the issue of the relationship between the partisan and the purist ways of viewing sport. The true perception theory regards the moderate fan as able to see the event as it really is, rather than concentrating on an aspect (as the extreme purist and extreme partisan do). The mixture theory is the view that ‘the moderate partisan has both partisan and purist perceptions of sport in some mixed way’. The oscillation theory, which Mumford favours, holds that the moderate sports fan switches or oscillates between competitive (partisan) and aesthetic (purist) ways of watching sport. This paper does not offer an alternative theory to Mumford’s account. Instead, it explores the possibility of dissolving the problem. Mumford is troubled by the distinction, and feels that he requires a theory to solve the problem he thinks it raises (and thereby explain the relationship between partisan and purist ways of viewing sport). The idea that purist and partisan ways of viewing sport are the only two options is explored, and a number of other possibilities are outlined. The paper considers the picture that appears to have motivated the idea that there is a problem here in need of a solution. One alternative picture is offered by means of a discussion of the phenomenon of aspect-perception, which, it is argued, is not a helpful model for thinking about football (soccer) spectatorship. This alternative picture is not a rival theory, but one possible example designed to show that there are other ways of thinking about football spectatorship that dissolve the problem with which Mumford is concerned.

Abstract

This paper develops the notion of cinema spectatorship as a travel experience. Drawing on well-known and lesser-known works on spectatorship theory and cinematic space, it argues that part of the pleasure of spectatorship is imagining one is inhabiting a virtual space, distinct from the real space of viewing. Cinematic space is thus fundamentally ‘other’ but it is a contained otherness that allows the spectator both the thrill of experiencing something distinct from one's norm and the comfort of protection from this difference. The dynamic of contained otherness is most akin to the travel experience of tourism. While these qualities are inherent in the medium of fictional moving images, film form also plays a role in accepting a touristic gaze or questioning it.

In this essay we seek to trouble the easy conflation of sexual and economic liberalism in contemporary India. Even as new regimes of consumption connect narratives of economic freedom with sexual freedom, there remain many constraints on women's ability to express sexuality in creative and autonomous, rather than obligatory and scripted, ways. Focusing on two recent episodes – proposals to ban cheerleaders in cricket performances in Maharashtra and the vigilante attacks in pubs and streets on women in southern Karnataka – we analyse reactions across varied political positions, including those of official women's organizations. Our goal is to bring theories of spectatorship to bear on understanding the politics of these episodes. We emphasize distinctions between the contexts of performance and reception, and argue that women's attire and conduct can be read in heterogeneous ways. Our aim is to seek a more effective feminist response to such controversies, and to articulate a vision of sexual autonomy that is not necessarily linked to hegemonic consumer behaviour.

Persuasion's Flows: Contagion, Affect, and the Power of Critical Judgment Or: 'The Slippery Realm of Experience': Miriam Hansen’s Critique of the Reification Thesis

In the literature on race in classical Hollywood cinema, local cinematic spectatorship hosted through the Black neighborhood theater has remained underexplored, even though this presentation was an important immediate context for Black spectators on the ground. In this essay, I combine theories of spectatorship with primary research into local Black theater programming and advertising practice in the late 1940s and 1950s. I explore how Black-designated, final-run theater exhibitors modified and productively bastardized textual materials released by the studios, critically altering, through reworked advertisements and irreverent programming choices, the film colony’s stereotyped or trepidatious black story lines and creating a new set of viewing positions for Black spectators. These advertisements give a different view of Hollywood narratives of race in an era where public acceptance of racial integration was incomplete.

Implicational Spectatorship:Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke Yuka Kanno (bio) What does it mean to have evidence of someone's sexual activities? of their sexuality? How can one even begin the assumption of that kind of knowledge except through the structures of phantasmatic projection? —Irit Rogoff, "Gossip as Testimony: A Postmodern Signature" The joke is the textual instance, which often seems most coercive in its production of reading effects. —Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis To fans of the now classic Japanese cinema of the late 1940s through the 1960s, the name of Hara Setsuko is always evoked with a certain nostalgia. For the younger generation who discovered the "good old Japan" of her postwar films, she is a privileged object of nostalgia, a locus of an imaginary longing for something they never experienced. The myth of this actress as "a goddess of postwar democracy" and "an ideal daughter of the middle class family" is also associated with the name Noriko, given to three separate yet parallel characters Hara plays in the films of Ozu Yasujirō: Late Spring (1949, Banshun), Early Summer (1951, Bakushū), and Tokyo Story (1953, Tōkyō [End Page 287] monogatari). These three films, along with Hara's Garbo-esque disappearance, cemented her image as the timeless and quintessential Ozu actress in Japan's national fantasy. Like many Ozuphiles, I have my own initiation tale. As a latecomer to Tokyo film culture, I watched this trilogy for the first time in the early nineties at Ginza's Namikiza theater.1 That tiny run-down theater, a now-destroyed landmark of Japanese cinema art houses, also introduced me to Naruse Mikio, nourishing my pleasure and imaginary nostalgia. Like many others, I was struck by Hara Setsuko, not so much by her legendary beauty as with what I can only now call a "queer" feeling, and the onscreen manner in which she evoked a seemingly conservative image of femininity. There was something odd, uncanny, and extravagant about the actress: the way she refused to marry, then suddenly changed her mind, and the extremely intimate manner in which she touched other women's bodies. The next two films of the Noriko trilogy continued to awaken the same feelings. Only now and retrospectively can I make sense of such an "illegitimate" sentiment that I strongly felt but was unable to then form into meaning. This essay explores the possibility of queer spectatorship by "implication," in which I take up the Noriko trilogy as an intersection of film, actress, and audience. By implication, I want to address the historicity of the present viewer, whose specificity is no less important than that of the past text. Instead of recreating the unified, closed, past world of the text and the spectator of the time, I insert my "now" with its desire to read the past film. My arguments for bridging the historical and temporal gap between the Noriko texts and the present condition are indebted to the notion of renrui (implication) proposed by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, who calls up the responsibility of those who "have not stolen land from others, but who live on stolen land."2 Therefore, what I do here is reconstitute the queerness of the past film text and the Noriko character in the present. Rather than confining the meanings of the past text to its contemporaneous spectator, it is my hope to open it up to the present spectator, thus making the former relevant to the latter. The term "implication" signals such a temporal and historical specificity of reading. Conversely, I am interested in the ways in which the rereading of the Noriko text helps present-day spectators to imagine a past queer spectatorship. Within film studies, the disciplinary master narrative of the 1980s "paradigm shift" around spectatorship theory is typically cast as a move from institutional theories (both apparatus and textual) to historical or empirical [End Page 288] studies of reception.3 Not only are the text and the viewer severed within this narrative, but the spectator is also divided into the conceptual and real. Following the lead of Judith Mayne, I use the term "spectator" to signify the point of tension between the cinematic...